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Sunday, February 05, 2017

Anarchism - from David Fleming's Lean Logic

Anarchism.
“Anarchism”, from the Greek an and arches, means “no
chief” – hence “no rule”, but there is more than one way of interpreting this,
and it has been anarchism’s big problem that people tend to settle on the wrong
one – the idea of anarchy as mere chaos.
It was in this sense that John Milton used it – as the state of affairs...

Where eldest Night

And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold

Eternal anarchy amidst the noise

Of endless wars, and by confusion stand;

For hot, cold, moist and dry,
four champions fierce,

Strive here for mast'ry.
(Paradise
Lost, book ii, lines 894-899)

Secondly,
there is the main body of anarchist literature.
We cannot really speak of “mainstream” anarchism, because anarchist
writers, as you might expect, have tended to disagree with each other. But there is a fundamental proposition in
common: governments have a poor, even catastrophic, record, guided by almost
any motive other than the interests of the people to whom they are in principle
responsible. If governments could
somehow be persuaded or forced to back off, the people could make a far better
job of things.

There are
some famous names in this literature, and they deserve a mention:[i]

oWilliam
Godwin (1756-1836) argued that the guide
to our actions should be reason, the logic of the Enlightenment. Once people have a rational understanding of
their duties, there is no need for such sensibilities as honour, generosity,
gratitude, promises, or even affections; nor for such limitations on individual
judgment as marriage, orchestras or the theatre, nor, of course, for
government. He did admit that this
enlightened deference to reason would not be easy to achieve; it would require
ceaseless vigilance and self-examination, he supposed, but beyond that, there
were no suggestions about how it was to be done, and Godwin’s rule of logic
lives on in the literature both as perhaps the most heroic of all statements of
the perfect society, a fantasy with remarkable staying power, for here we are
considering it two centuries later.[ii]

oMax Stirner
(1806-1856) took individualism as far as it would go: no state, government,
private property, religion, family, ethics, love or associations beyond what
individuals happen to want, when they want it.[iii]

oLeo Tolstoy
(1828-1910) looked to the Gospels for the peace and love, which is all that is
needed, he claimed, to sustain society without governments, laws, police,
armies and private property.[iv]

oPierre-Joseph
Proudhon (1809-1865) was an early, and strong supporter of localisation: the
best safeguard of liberty and justice lies in food producers and craftsmen
working together in cooperatives.[v]

oMichael Bakunin
(1814-1876) looked to the violent overthrow of the state, and its replacement
as a bottom-up federation of trade-unions (anarcho-syndicalism).[vi]

oPeter
Kropotkin (1842-1921) developed his advocacy of the abolition of private
property and communal living in an extended and valuable discussion of land,
biodynamic farming, decentralised urban planning, technology and the history of
effective local action.[vii]

CULTURE AND GOOD SENSE

Matthew
Arnold’s orderly anarchism

For Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), the cohesive
principle is a common culture. By
“culture” what he had in mind was the very highest standards, “a pursuit of
our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which
most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.”[viii] Later critics picked him up on this:
culture is not limited to the best; it is, less ambitiously, the common story
and tradition of a *community – but Arnold’s point holds: the way in which a
community can preserve itself from anarchy (in its chaotic, Miltonian sense),
is to build a community which is interesting enough to recognise itself as a
particular place with its own identity, loyalties and obligation. The outcome, as Arnold put it (the above sentence fills in
the logic which Arnold
does not spell out) is that a community learns “to like what right reason
ordains.”[ix]

The common
factor for most of these (but not Matthew Arnold, box) is the desire to see the
end of government, and the most explicit statement of this is Bakunin’s
anarcho-syndicalism, which sees trade unions as the spearhead of revolution,
destroying both the government and the capitalism that sustains it. In this way, the strengths of traditional
anarchism’s positive visions and insights were impaired by the tendency to
focus on one ideal solution – an ideology in its own right – as the magic pain
that had to be endured first, before anarchism itself could have a chance. A broader, more real vision was suggested by
Alexander Herzen (1812-1870), who warned of the consequences of *abstraction,
and insisted, instead, on the case for focusing on the local, the feasible, the
practical, tangible, the proven – on the freedom to make and care for the
particular place. It was this grounded
vision which, a century later, was taken up by Colin Ward.[x]

For Ward,
anarchy (or, perhaps less confrontationally, “anarchism”) is the study of organisation
– of rule of a particular kind: self-rule, the orderly habits and interactions
that come into being with the formation and maintenance of human groups. Anarchism, as Ward explains,

Anarchists
are people who make a social and political philosophy out of the natural and
spontaneous tendency of humans to associate together for their mutual benefit.[xii]

As Ward
points out, the reality underlying this is undeniable: the speed, efficiency
and *imagination with which people bring order to a situation which has
potential for chaos is revealed whenever a group of people are aligned,
in the sense of having a common interests and a common purpose. It applies, for instance, at times of protest
– at Climate Camp in the United
Kingdom in 2008, for instance, and in the
uprisings in Budapest
in 1956 and in Prague
in 1968, when good order and altruism were as solid as the commitment to
sustain the revolutions. During the
Hungarian uprising, it was the custom in Budapest...

... to put
big boxes on street corners, and just a script over them, “This is for the
wounded and for the families of the dead”.
They were set out in the morning and by noon they were full of money.[xiii]

Happenings
like these are exceptional, of course.
In due course the revolutions are either suppressed or successful, and
things go back to normal, and yet they have something to tell us which could be
useful. Among the students of revolution
who have noticed the remarkably competent groupings and councils that come into
being if given a chance, Hannah Arendt writes ...

Each time
they appeared, they sprang up as the spontaneous organs of the people, not only
outside of all revolutionary parties but entirely unexpected by them and their
leaders. They were utterly neglected by
statesmen, historians, political theorists and, most importantly, by the
revolutionary tradition itself. [Even
sympathetic historians] regarded them as nothing more than essentially
temporary organs in the revolutionary struggle for liberation; that is to say,
they failed to understand to what extent the council system confronted them
with an entirely new form of government, with a new public space for freedom.[xiv]

The
emphasis here is on what can be done in practice (a bottom-up way of thinking),
rather than on ambitions about having to do a lot of demolition first.

On the
other hand, the state’s natural reflex is to make things difficult, even
without intending to do so. The
essential freedoms and resources which enable local action are eroded by
governments, and, in some cases, such as education, their elimination is
comprehensive. And in terms of sheer practical
possibility, too, the option of effective local community is becoming more
remote: it is harder to make practical sense of things, for instance, in a
locality which has lost its post office, hospital, school, surgery, shops,
abattoir, railway station, local trades, church, magistrates court, probation
services and local presence in farmland, and where it is difficult to decide on
a collective celebration, owing to (amongst other things) prohibitions on
grounds of health and safety, the fees and lead-times needed for an
entertainments licence, and the sense that there is no cultural expression
which does not exclude or offend many or most of the people living there.

And yet,
anarchism, in the cool, practical, local sense intended by Colin Ward, recognises
that we innate community-builders ought to concentrate on what we can
positively do. We have a talent for
order, and the inherited culture and accomplishments of the modern world are
mainly the product of this talent. The
history of social inventions, the institutions and social capital that give us
existence as a recognisable and living society, is the history of anarchism in
this sense. Medicine – the science and
the institutions – were the product of voluntary persistence, backed by
charitable donations, as were the schools and universities. The whole of our inheritance of education was
invented and made to happen by citizens, investing their time and talent in
schools and colleges, in teaching as a creative skill in its own right, in
sustaining diversity, and in increasing access.
Even such fundamentals as insurance against accident, sickness and loss
of income – arranged through the friendly societies, and owned by their members
– were voluntary enterprises and, from their start in the eighteenth century to
their displacement by a state system in 1911, they had expanded their reach to
almost universal coverage of working people.
The organic movement began as a citizens’ inspiration, developing its authority
and its scientific standing by using its freedom to decide for itself.[xv]

The weak
point in that capacity for invention – in the spontaneous order that is the
primary aim and accomplishment of anarchism – is that it is exposed to the
distrust and jealously of centralising governments. If it works, it tends to be taken over, and the
spontaneous order tends to die.

Anarchism
has had its moments. There are insights
there that are relevant to a future of insolvent government, a deeply
diminished economy, and no alternative for communities other than to invent everything
for themselves, including the meaning of community. Lean Logic will borrow from it, and will mix
it with other lines of enquiry which most anarchists would have been horrified
by. But, then, anarchists have always
had trouble with their allies.[xvi]

[i]. Note
that Ted Honderich (1995), The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, is a
helpful first reference on anarchy and its main thinkers (though it omits Colin
Ward).

[ii]. William
Godwin (1793), An Enquiry Concerting Political Justice and its Influence on
Modern Morals and Happiness; William Godwin (1794), Caleb Williams. For an accessible summary of Godwin’s
anarchist thought, see Roy Porter (2000), Enlightenment, pp 455-459.

[iii]. Peter
Marshall (2010), Demanding the
Impossible: A History of Anarchism, pp 220-234.

[vii]. See
Peter Kropotkin (1899), Fields, Factories and Workshops especially in
the (1974) edition by Colin Ward. See
also Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread and Mutual Aid. [Publication details to follow]

[xv]. A
major influence on Ward’s thinking was Percival Goodman and Paul Goodman (1947,
1960), Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life, at it remains a
core text of the anarchist literature, especially in the context of land use
and planning. For brief histories of the
evolution of medicine, education and social security in the United Kingdom,
see James Bartholemew (2004), The Welfare State We’re In.